Wednesday, November 9, 2016

That Did Not Go Well

This is not a normal entry about Bangkok or life in Asia. These are some of my thoughts about the decision made by my countrymen this week. There are lots of links to follow for more reading.

Women at the Democrats Abroad Thailand election watch party (I use "party" loosely) sit in stunned silence as the US election results come in at the Roadhouse BBQ, an American restaurant in Bangkok.

The United States' held its Presidential election Wednesday (Tuesday night in the US, but I watched results come in from Bangkok, which is 12 hours ahead of Washington DC, so it was Wednesday morning).

A lot of people, including me, are disappointed with the results. Most of us thought the country would pick a flawed but qualified technocrat to run the country over a man-child with no impulse control.

To me, based on character alone, it wasn't even close. The eventual victor is manifestly unqualified to be President.

The mood at the Roadhouse was dour all morning.

I always felt being a photojournalist was close to having the best job in the world. My life behind the camera exposed me to people and circumstances few others get to experience.

I saw, during my travels in out-state Arizona and elsewhere in America, how shallow the economic recovery was and how angry people were. From ranchers and farmers who could barely make ends meet selling their products to middlemen who reaped disproportionally higher profits to copper miners who suffered through paycuts, loss of benefits and layoffs and worse as the mines, that once supplied copper to a nation, closed up and their communities became literal ghost towns, to factory workers who lived in permanent fear of their jobs being shipped to Mexico.

I knew I was incredibly lucky and privileged to be getting paid well to do something I loved and I something I thought was important.

There was never anything to cheer about during the long morning's election watch.

I know people are/were angry. NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements left them behind while corporations reported higher and higher profits. Not one banker was prosecuted for causing the world's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

What I don't understand is how people channelled their anger. In the states hardest hit by the Great Recession they voted for Republicans. Republicans who cut their unemployment benefits and social services. Republicans who laid off their teachers and closed their schools. Republicans who railed against minorities and created fear of "people not like us."

As the situation in those states got worse, they reelected the Republicans. They voted against their own interests over and over and over again.

Kansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Wisconsin, all kept voting for Republicans who, while they cut taxes, also gutted social services and education, and let infrastructure crumble. The tax cuts disproportionately benefit the elite at the very top of the social ladder. The education and social services cuts hurt the people at the bottom of the ladder. They've guaranteed a permanent underclass that scrapes to get by.

States that elected Democratic leadership, in comparison, did and are doing, better. Things are not perfect and there's a real urban/rural divide but places like Minnesota and California have worker shortages and higher wages while Wisconsin and Arizona flounder. (Professional sports stadiums in the Twin Cities bus in workers from out of state.) Taxes are higher but people are seeing benefits to those taxes in stronger education systems, better infrastructure and better social services.

Nothing to cheer about.

I'm not surprised a protest candidate won came in second in the popular vote.

Any one of these traits should disqualify a candidate for the Presidency but the US just selected one who displays all of them (and we haven't even gotten to the racism and Klan endorsements, fraud or tax abuses). It's a hard thing for me come to terms with. I understand the anger. I empathize with it. But the choices made by the angry people make absolutely no sense to me.

But we also threw off the shackles of isolationism and eventually came to the aid of the forces of democracy in World War 2. We helped rebuild Europe after the war.

We provide humanitarian assistance in times of disaster, whether a tsunami in Asia, an earthquake in Haiti, or an ebola epidemic in Africa. The response is not always perfect but no one in the world does logistics better than the American military. When we put our minds to it, we can be agents of change.

Finally, I guess that after the President Obama's tenure, American males of a certain age were so afraid of a woman becoming President, doing the one last thing a woman had never done, that they selected someone who is not woman. But neither is he a man we can look up to.

We try to go back to the US once a year. Each time I go back I feel more like a stranger in a strange land. Feeling out of place around people who look like me and talk like me but are not like me. It's a weird feeling. I'm dreading the feelings that will get dredged up when we go back next April.

* If there is anything I take from the election, it's that our better angels didn't completely desert us. We must remember The GOP candidate did not "win" the election. He came in second.